August | 2012 | WifeMomPancreas

Six months. It has been six months since Medium was diagnosed with type I diabetes. (Well actually, it’s been almost 7 months now).

But six months is apparently the magic number for me. I am finally at the point where I don’t think about Medium’s diabetes minute to minute or hour to hour. After six months I guess I realize that we do know what we’re doing and, to some degree anyway, we can predict what his body is going to do. I haven’t been blogging much lately. Mostly because I’m busy, but it turns out I just don’t have very much to say lately, at least as far as diabetes goes.

Things here at home have been pretty status quo.

Medium’s numbers have been okay, more on the high side, but we have things under control. We had his three-month endocrine appointment the other day and they agreed that he is coming out of his honeymoon phase. We made some adjustments and I think things are going to be fine.

He started school this week too. His teacher seems nice, although she seems a little nervous about the diabetes. But I think she’s going to be great and I think she will pay really close attention and make sure that Medium is okay while he’s in class.

And of course our school nurse is there and she is awesome and everything is running smoothly.

My brother and his family just moved here from Ohio and they have three boys around the same ages as my boys, so Medium is loving getting to spend so much time with his cousins.

My husband and I have even stopped getting up at 3 AM to check his blood sugar. We do a midnight check and if one of us wakes up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom or something we will check him but we are no longer setting our alarm for 3 AM.

Right now things are just… Normal.

It’s weird.

We have our house on the market right now so it’s clean, it’s picked up, its immaculate and that has relieved so much stress for me.

So right now, at this very moment in time, my emotions are in check. I’m not feeling overwhelmed with thoughts that I need to get out in blog posts.

The house is clean, the kids are back in school, and diabetes, for right now anyway, is behaving itself.

I don’t know how long this will last, but I’ll take it!

I’m sure there is some kind of drama lurking around the corner, and I will be able to fill pages and pages of blog posts. But for now I am signing off.

Until the next catastrophe…

Wow, it has been so long since I blogged that I had to go back and read some of my own posts to reacquaint myself with my blog!

And boy was I angry a month ago. Wow. I promise to not do THAT again! Well, I guess I can’t promise that, but I will try. 🙂

So, so much has happened in the last 6 weeks. I have just been super busy. My oldest and my youngest and I were all in a production of The Wizard of Oz last weekend. It was so much fun, but man was that exhausting! For three weeks straight I went straight from work to rehearsal. Fourteen hour days for three weeks almost killed me! Thank God Medium went to diabetes camp during that time and I actually got five nights of uninterrupted sleep! I was so worried about him and what his numbers were and how he was doing and if he was having any fun at all or was he just terribly homesick, that I had to take an Ambien every night to ensure that I actually slept. But then my days were filled with work and Oz rehearsal so the week really flew by! And he had a great time! He did not brush his teeth even once while he was gone, but he had fun! He had fun and we got a MUCH NEEDED break! So I’d say it was a success!

I really struggled when he first got back from camp. His emotions were all over the place and I think he was exhausted. And then there were his blood sugars. They were SUPER high when he got back from camp. I was really feeling guilty about how I was feeling; that it was so nice while he was gone. We could eat food without thinking about what it was, how many ounces it was and how many carbohydrates were in it. The house stayed picked up, there was no arguing between the other boys, there was so much less stress in the house with him gone. Because besides having T1D, Medium also has ADHD and that, sometimes, is harder to deal with than the diabetes. At least with diabetes you know what you are trying to accomplish. It might be extremely difficult sometimes to hit that moving target, but at least I know that I am trying to hit the target. I know that I need to keep his blood glucose between 70 mg/dL and 140 mg/dL at all times. That is my goal. And to accomplish that goal, I check his blood sugar often and then I either feed him or give him insulin. I am over-simplifying this to make my point, which I will get to, someday.

With ADHD, I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I AM DOING! (hey, look at that, I got right to the point! Not usually my style!)

There is no rule book. When he lies to me, I don’t know if that is him being a pain in the butt 10 year-old or if that is his ADHD. When he sneaks food, I don’t know if that is him just taking what he wants because he is a kid, or if it is the uncontrolled impulses of his ADHD. When we ask him to take a shower and he yells at us and tells us that he’s not going to do that and that we are stupid, is that just him being defiant, or is that his ADHD? And then when we finally drag his sorry butt up the stairs and walk him into the shower and then he comes out of the shower with dry hair and puts on dirty clothing, is that just him being lazy, or is that his inability to focus and complete tasks with multiple steps that is a hallmark sign of ADHD?

The answer is, I just don’t know. And I don’t know what to do about it. We have tried everything. We have punished, we have yelled, we have taken away privileges, we have spanked, we have tried natural consequences, we have done it all. NONE OF IT MAKES A SHIT BIT OF DIFFERENCE! Which is what makes me think, it is more his ADHD than anything. So then what do we do? Just let him get away with this behavior? ADHD or not, this kind of behavior is not acceptable and should have consequences. So he is either ALWAYS in trouble, or just walks scott-free. I feel bad when he is always in trouble, especially if he really can’t control it, but I can’t stand the behavior!

We have been dealing with these issues all of his life (and for the record, he does take medication for his ADHD). Then he was diagnosed with diabetes and things have gotten worse. Now there are far graver consequences to him sneaking food (one of his favorite pastimes). And for the first six weeks after diagnosis we were waking him up in the middle of the night to feed him because he was low, so we knew he wasn’t sleeping well, so we chalked up his bad behavior to being tired and not feeling well from blood sugar swings of highs and lows. And then, of course, there is the simple fact that the kid was diagnosed with a life-threatening, chronic disease with no cure. So of course we wanted to cut him some slack.

But it has been six months since diagnosis and we have got to get a handle on this situation. We got the name of a counselor from a friend and I think we need to take him. Not just for us, but for him. Honestly, he doesn’t seem to be bothered too much by his diagnosis, but I know that he might be keeping it all in, or not know how to talk about it.

So we will try this.

Because if we don’t….